We shouldn’t be surprised to hear that George Bush dined with a group of historians on Sunday night. The president has spent much of his second term pleading with history. But however hard he lobbies the gatekeepers of memory, he will surely be judged the worst president the United States has ever had. 

Even if historians were somehow to forget the illegal war, the mangling of international law, the trashing of the environment and social welfare, the banking crisis, and the transfer of wealth from rich to poor, one image is stamped indelibly on this presidency: the trussed automatons in orange jumpsuits.  

It portrays a superpower prepared to dehumanise its prisoners, to wrap, blind and deafen them, to reduce them to mannequins, in a place as stark and industrial as a chicken-packing plant. Worse, the government was proud of what it had done. It was parading its impunity. It wanted us to know that nothing would stand in its way: its power was both sovereign and unaccountable. 

Guantánamo Has Proved A Useful Distraction From The US's Secret Detention Camps 

and whilst the bushit war criminals will continue to be exposed ….. 

The US military hid the locations of suspected terrorist detainees and concealed harsh treatment to avoid the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to documents that a Senate committee released Tuesday. 

"We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques," Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, a military lawyer who's since retired, said during an October 2002 meeting at the Guantanamo Bay prison to discuss [the use of] torture…  

Documents Confirm US Hid Detainees From Red Cross 

their accomplices continue their filthy work ….. 

One of the most reliable methods for knowing that a position is unsustainable is that its advocates must employ outright falsehoods in order to support it. In a Wall St. Journal Op-Ed today, John Yoo defends the right of the Bush administration to imprison people at Guantanamo indefinitely with no judicial review and condemns last week's Supreme Court habeas corpus ruling as "judicial imperialism of the highest order." To do so, Yoo asserts what have become the now-standard though still-blatant falsehoods on this issue. 

It takes an indescribably authoritarian mind to believe that one's own Government should have the power to put people in cages for life without having to provide them any meaningful opportunity to prove that they did not do what they are accused of. And it takes a deeply dishonest advocate to claim that the Supreme Court's ruling was designed to protect "Al Qaeda terrorists" who were "captured fighting against the U.S," given that large numbers of our detainees are not "Al Qaeda terrorists" and were not "captured fighting against the U.S."  

With his attack on the Supreme Court, John Yoo has proven himself -- yet again -- to be both authoritarian and incomparably dishonest. But the two glaring falsehoods in today's Op-Ed -- that habeas protections protect "Al Qaeda terrorists" and that Guantanamo detainees were captured on the battlefield -- are precisely the ones that have been used for so long to obscure the real dangers of vesting our Government with the power of lawless imprisonment. 

John Yoo's Ongoing Falsehoods In Service Of Limitless Government Power